In December, 1761, he professed indifference to the course of events in England, though two months earlier his champion Pitt had given place to men who preferred the Austrian alliance to the Prussian, and who desired that separate peace with France which Pitt had rejected in 1758. The treaty then made between England and Prussia forbade either to make peace without the other till April 11th of the following year. In 1759, 1760, and 1761 this compact had been renewed. Now, however, Newcastle and Bute began to clamour for what Pitt had ventured only to suggest—that Frederick should purchase peace by some concession conformable to the course of the Continental war. The Prussian envoys in London dared to advise their sovereign to comply. He answered that they were in nowise permitted to give him such foolish and impertinent counsel. “Your father,” he wrote to one of them, though the charge was baseless, “took bribes from France and England; has he bequeathed the habit to you?” Frederick’s inflexible resolve to make no concession was by no means the same as a resolve to make no bargain. He often played with the fancy that Saxony or a part of it might be left in his hands at the peace. For this he would gladly surrender any or all of his outlying provinces. But he would rather forfeit the English subsidy and jeopardise the very existence of the Prussian State than sue for the peace which Kaunitz was more than willing to conclude on terms of moderate profit for the allies. Two weighty reasons of policy increased his determination. The labours of the winter once again filled the ranks and the war-chest of Prussia. And Fortune, of whom the King said that she alone could extricate him, now gave with one hand more than she took away with the other. At the moment when England left him, Russia ranged herself at his side. The cause of this marvellous revolution was the accident that the Czarina died early in January, 1762, and that her nephew and successor, Peter III., was a worshipper of the King of Prussia. Elizabeth had lived in debauchery and left upwards of 15,000 dresses to bear witness to her luxurious tastes. It is possible that her chief motive in attacking Frederick was a desire to chastise the man who had spoken ill of her. But there can be no doubt that her policy was suited to the interests of the State. It was argued at a later date that her alliance with the Queen had cost Russia countless lives and sixty millions of money. But in 1762 it had already procured Ost-Preussen and part of Pomerania, and there seemed to be good hope that Prussia, the only Power which could prevent a vast extension of Russian influence in Poland, would be permanently crippled. If the allies dared not attack the King of Prussia, they were at least in a fair way to exhaust his strength.